A fire in a retirement home in northern Spain in the predawn hours of Friday killed at least 10 people, the emergency services and other authorities said.
Sixty-nine people were inside the care home in Villafranca de Ebro, a farming town in the northern region of Aragón, when the fire broke out, Patricia Ciria, the Spanish government spokeswoman in the region, said.
Two other people were taken to a hospital in critical condition, she added. The authorities had earlier given a higher figure, 82, for the number of people in the facility.
“The first indications point to the fire’s having started in a room,” Ms. Ciria said by phone. The Spanish Civil Guard is investigating the cause of the fire, she added. The extent of the damage was not immediately clear.
Most of the residents were unharmed and had been transferred to another care facility, in Huesca, a town about 55 miles away, Ms. Ciria added.
On Friday morning, firefighters were called in from the regional capital, Zaragoza, about 18 miles away, the authorities said. The town’s residents worked with the emergency services and the civil guard to evacuate people, Volga Ramírez, the town’s mayor told Spain’s national radio station, RNE.
Just after 5 a.m., all of the victims had been evacuated and the bodies removed, the mayor added.
The retirement home, called Jardines de Villafranca, or Gardens of Villafranca, is in a town of about 840 people, where everyone knows the facility’s residents, the mayor said.
“It’s very hard, very hard,” Ms. Ramírez told the radio station, adding that the survivors were visibly shaken and in shock.
The retirement home specializes in the care of people living with dementia and cognitive degeneration, with residents needing varying levels of care, according to its social media page.
The government of Aragón, a mountainous region bordering France, which includes Villafranca de Ebro, declared Saturday a day of mourning, with flags to be flown at half-staff.
The region has been hit by similar tragedy before. In 2015, eight people were killed when a fire broke out at a retirement home in Cuarte de Huerva, just south of Zaragoza.
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